When will the war between the United States and Iran finally come to an end? American officials have repeatedly claimed that the answer is just around the corner. "I think the war is going to end immediately after the November election," declared U.S. President Donald Trump in September, expressing confidence that "they can’t hold out any longer." Iranian leaders have similarly projected a sense of imminent resolution. Tehran has "brought the most heavily armed army in the history of the world to its knees," proclaimed Ahmad Vahidi, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in August.
While many outside analysts argue that the conflict will drag on much longer and ultimately conclude through complex negotiations rather than a decisive military victory, a general consensus has emerged that the fighting must soon be resolved one way or another.
Such thinking is entirely understandable. All wars eventually reach a stopping point, and after months of climbing energy prices and economic strain, the global community is intensely eager for the hostilities to cease. Yet the unsettling reality on the ground is that the conflict is nowhere near over. The two principal belligerents find themselves trapped in a strategic paradox: neither can achieve its desired ultimate goals, yet both feel they are accomplishing enough through a combination of military strikes and economic pressure to make continued fighting worthwhile.
The United States cannot topple the Iranian regime, force it to give up its ballistic missile program, compel it to abandon its nuclear ambitions, or halt its financial and logistical support for regional proxies and partners. However, Washington retains the capability to continually degrade Iran’s military infrastructure and constrict its national economy. Conversely, Iran cannot evict the world’s sole superpower from the Middle East. Yet Tehran possesses the means to repeatedly damage U.S. regional bases, strike American regional allies, and disrupt vital international commerce through the Persian Gulf.
Crucially, both states maintain the resources needed to sustain the fight indefinitely—and both genuinely believe they have no other choice. Each side operates under the assumption that if it lets up even slightly, the adversary will press forward relentlessly until it achieves its primary objectives or inflicts total humiliation. Periodic talks take place, but they are entirely devoid of mutual trust. In fact, both Washington and Tehran harbor deep suspicions that the other would simply use a formal cease-fire to regroup, resupply, and launch a renewed offensive.
The Iranian government fears that relinquishing strategic leverage—whether over the Strait of Hormuz, its missile arsenal, or its nuclear program—would leave it dangerously exposed to overwhelming pressure later. Washington, for its part, worries that sweeping sanctions relief would provide Tehran with the financial resources and time needed to reconstitute its diminished military capabilities. Meanwhile, Israel fears that any form of restraint today would only breed a much stronger, more defiant Iran tomorrow. The steps required to escape the war look perilous precisely because they demand that each adversary temporarily make itself more vulnerable.
Consequently, the war will carry on much as it has. There will likely be no comprehensive resolution and no lasting peace deal. Yet because the status quo remains sustainable for each government, and because neither party holds the raw power to decisively seize the upper hand, there will be no dramatic escalation either. Tehran and Washington will not be decisively defeated, but neither will emerge victorious.
No Way Out
For the United States, the military campaign was never supposed to unfold in this manner. When Washington joined Israel in launching large-scale airstrikes against the Islamic Republic on February 28, American planners anticipated a swift and decisive victory. After all, the two allied nations had already systematically destroyed or buried most of Iran’s known nuclear facilities and blown up numerous missile sites during previous operations in June 2025. Israel had successfully eliminated scores of senior Iranian scientists and more than two dozen key military leaders, while simultaneously decimating Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
Furthermore, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—a longtime and crucial Iranian ally—had recently lost power, and massive domestic protests had severely rocked the Iranian government itself. At the time, the U.S. military and the Israel Defense Forces enjoyed what appeared to be uncontested dominance over Iranian airspace. The regime, by all external accounts, seemed to be teetering on the precipice of collapse.
In the opening days of the expanded conflict, Israel and the United States assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with many of the country’s top military commanders. Yet predictions that the Islamic Republic would rapidly disintegrate proved entirely incorrect. The regime swiftly replaced fallen officials and immediately set about striking back at its adversaries. Iranian forces successfully targeted and blew up American jets, missile launchers, and critical radar systems scattered across military installations throughout the Persian Gulf. They also seized direct control of the Strait of Hormuz, severely squeezing commercial shipping flows through the vital waterway. Furthermore, Iranian forces launched calculated attacks against civilian infrastructure across the Gulf region, making Washington’s local partners pay a heavy price for enabling the U.S.-Israeli assault.
American officials have consistently downplayed these setbacks, maintaining public promises that the Iranian regime is just one more strategic strike or economic sanction away from being forced into major concessions. However, it is extremely unlikely that Israel and Washington will ever force Tehran to compromise on anything of fundamental significance. They have repeatedly attempted to bomb the regime’s officials and military programs out of existence, only for Tehran to rapidly rebuild and adapt. It remains difficult to see how future airstrikes can successfully accomplish what past waves of bombardment failed to achieve.
The United States has naturally added a new economic dimension to its assault, piling stringent sanctions atop a naval blockade of Iran’s southern coast and periodic air raids. These restrictive measures have successfully constricted Iran’s access to global markets, hindering its ability to import various commercial goods and export key commodities such as crude oil. Yet this pressure is also unlikely to persuade the regime to surrender. Overland trade routes and the Caspian Sea complicate any attempt to hermetically seal Iran, even if those alternative pathways cannot fully compensate for closed naval routes and dwindling air links.
At the same time, China and Russia have stepped in to provide a variety of necessary goods and valuable military intelligence. While the economic impact of the U.S. cutoffs is undeniably real, the Iranian government prefers to pass the suffering directly onto its civilian population by slashing public subsidies rather than curbing spending on its vital military and security services, which it relies upon to defend against external adversaries and crush internal dissent. Ordinary citizens must contend head-on with a collapsing currency and runaway inflation; to average Iranians, describing the present situation as sustainable sounds almost obscene. Yet what might be entirely unsustainable for Iranian society can remain perfectly sustainable for the autocratic state. The Islamic Republic does not need to protect Iran as a whole from economic decay; it only needs to protect the core institutions and constituencies necessary for its own survival.
U.S. officials may harbor hopes that as the population grows poorer, Tehran will experience a sudden change of heart. Yet Iranian leaders view themselves as confronting an existential challenge, and under such circumstances, leadership circles rarely regard any level of economic hardship as a definitive breaking point. Moreover, the regime has endured far worse conditions for much longer periods in the past. From 1980 to 1988, the country fought a grueling war with Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians and inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Even that catastrophic conflict was not enough to make Tehran quit. In fact, after successfully expelling Iraqi forces from its own territory, Iran went on to invade its adversary and spent six years trying to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein despite deepening domestic suffering. It ultimately took major Iraqi battlefield advances, growing direct U.S. military involvement in the Gulf, and a shifting regional balance of power to finally bring that historical conflict to a halt.
Naturally, the United States has not played all of its military cards. Washington could theoretically deploy ground troops, but such operations would likely result in catastrophic U.S. casualties and drive global energy prices to unprecedented heights, rendering them politically infeasible. Alternatively, Washington could launch massive airstrikes against core domestic infrastructure targets, causing generational damage to Iran’s energy network, transportation grids, and communications systems. Yet Tehran would undoubtedly retaliate in kind against American partners across the Gulf, once again triggering a devastating spike in energy costs.
The Iranian regime has frequently celebrated its resilience in the face of relentless U.S. attacks, but its own prospects for defeating the United States look similarly grim. The country cannot easily escalate the pressure further because its severe domestic economic distress narrows the margin for strategic recklessness. While Iran’s leadership believes it can survive prolonged hardship, initiating another major confrontation with the United States would risk catastrophic internal damage amid an already frayed social contract.
Equally important, Iranian officials have little reason to believe that dramatic escalation would compel Washington to retreat; a major provocation could just as easily trigger a far more destructive and unpredictable response from an impulsive U.S. president. For the time being, Tehran prefers to impose calibrated, calculated costs on the United States, preserve its strategic leverage, and test American resolve without crossing the threshold that would prompt intensive, overwhelming retaliation.
Even if Tehran were to dramatically escalate hostilities, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to triumph. While Iran can weaken the United States’ regional footprint and has already forced Washington to spend enormous sums—exceeding $40 billion and continuing to climb—on the conflict, the overall U.S. federal budget remains in the trillions of dollars. Furthermore, Washington maintains a vast stockpile of less sophisticated conventional munitions that it can utilize as its advanced inventories run low. While the U.S. military has lost personnel, the toll remains a tiny fraction of the casualties suffered during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Crucially, the U.S. military can keep its own casualties relatively low by fighting from a distance, launching precision missiles from outside Iranian territory.
Strait of Equilibrium
At first glance, the reality that neither Tehran nor Washington can achieve an outright victory might seem to bode well for peace. When warring nations realize that total victory is completely unachievable, they frequently turn to diplomatic settlements. However, both Iran and the United States maintain critical secondary aims, and both remain convinced that continuing the fight will help secure those goals. Washington, for instance, believes that periodic military strikes ensure Tehran can never fully regenerate its armed forces or successfully develop nuclear weapons. By hitting Iran whenever the regime crosses specific thresholds—such as rebuilding a concerning weapons system or resuming uranium enrichment—the United States believes it can keep its adversary permanently weakened without assuming the massive political and military risks required to attempt a full regime change.
Iran, on the other hand, believes that continued fighting will help it rebuild the deterrence it has steadily lost. The regime is actively mobilizing regional partners, including various Iraqi militias and the Houthi movement in Yemen, to keep its adversaries under constant fire from multiple directions. The Iranian leadership has also grown significantly more willing to strike first. In July, for instance, Tehran launched a direct missile attack on a military base in Jordan hosting U.S. personnel, despite the absence of an immediately preceding American strike. Most importantly, Iran has sought to dominate the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials previously regarded the closure of the strategic waterway as an absolute measure of last resort, to be attempted only under extreme circumstances, and thus held off until all-out war erupted. Within a single day of the conflict, however, Tehran demonstrated that it could effectively control the strait by targeting commercial vessels with drones and missiles, granting the regime an unprecedented source of strategic leverage.
Iran also calculates that continued fighting will help it regain and potentially expand the regional clout that had severely waned prior to the war, when it repeatedly failed to deter rivals and its network of regional partners lost influence. This dynamic explains why, when Israel and the United States struck Iran in February, Tehran immediately responded by widening the battlefield to encompass the entire Middle East, including Gulf Arab nations that had spent recent years carefully rebuilding diplomatic relations with Tehran. In total, Iran has attacked more than a dozen countries across the region, aiming to persuade those states to pivot away from Washington by demonstrating that maintaining close partnerships with the United States leaves them dangerously vulnerable.
While Washington’s and Tehran’s strategic assessments may ultimately prove right or wrong, the core reality remains that even if both sides stand to gain nothing from prolonged fighting—and even if both privately recognize that fact—they will struggle immensely to reach a lasting resolution. Because Iranian officials firmly believe that their American counterparts are fundamentally bent on the total destruction of the Islamic Republic, they feel they cannot stop fighting even if they desired to. Washington does not harbor identical existential fears, but U.S. officials still believe they cannot afford to back down. In the eyes of the White House, offering Iran the concessions it wants most—sweeping sanctions relief and formal recognition of the regime’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz—would mean empowering a dangerous adversary and effectively rewarding military coercion.
In theory, Iran and the United States could resolve these deep-seated concerns through effective diplomacy. In practice, however, neither side trusts the other enough to execute lasting tradeoffs. A clear illustration of this dynamic occurred with the memorandum of understanding signed by both sides in June, which was intended to bring a temporary halt to the war. The diplomatic deal was designed to address both nations’ core priorities by reopening the Strait of Hormuz and establishing formal negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for widespread sanctions relief and an immediate end to attacks on Iran and its regional partners.
However, it quickly became apparent that U.S. and Iranian officials fundamentally disagreed on the operational details. Washington argued that the agreement meant commercial ships could freely pass through the strait without interference, whereas Tehran insisted it retained the sovereign right to dictate the manner of transit and impose transit fees. Consequently, Iranian forces fired on merchant vessels traveling along Oman’s coastline rather than its own territorial waters, thoroughly infuriating U.S. officials.
Iran, meanwhile, accused Washington of violating the core terms of the deal by failing to immediately release billions of dollars in frozen national assets and neglecting to stop Israel from striking Hezbollah positions. Both sides quickly concluded that the other was acting in profound bad faith, and the conflict swiftly resumed.
That high-profile failure does not mean Tehran and Washington will never negotiate again. They will likely maintain backchannel dialogues and may periodically pause the conflict to regroup and reassess. Yet diplomacy and war can easily occur simultaneously, much like the years of parallel talks and fighting between North Korea and the United States in the 1950s that eventually preceded a durable armistice. As long as Tehran and Washington remain both capable of and committed to inflicting pain upon one another, the war will not end regardless of how much they talk.
Neighborhood Watch
The ongoing war against Iran has settled into a grinding stasis, but the conflict is fundamentally transforming both the Islamic Republic and the surrounding Middle East. Traditionally, Iran has operated as a complex autocracy, maintaining a political order that blends clerical authority, elected legislative institutions, powerful security and military agencies, competing patronage networks, and a surprisingly vibrant civil society. However, the death of Supreme Leader Khamenei eliminated the regime’s paramount figure, severely disrupting the delicate internal balance of power. The ongoing war is now systematically prioritizing the apparatuses of the state responsible for immediate survival over all else.
This permanent state of conflict will only further elevate Iranians in uniform over Iranians in suits—and potentially even over those in clerical garb. The Islamic Republic’s already withered participatory institutions will continue to fade, while the raw power of its military and security elites becomes increasingly shrouded beneath a thinning theocratic cloak.
This transformation does not imply that the non-armed factions of the country’s traditional power structure will lose all influence. Civilian politicians may continue to debate whether Iran should pursue negotiations or calculate how much additional economic pain the general population can tolerate. However, their policy ideas remain entirely at the mercy of the armed elite, whose primary focus is restoring military deterrence and preserving enough offensive capability to strike Iran’s adversaries. While the country is not going to entirely eliminate its civilian governance institutions, more and more areas of daily life—including telecommunications, foreign investment, university administration, the media, and national economic policy—are being classified as matters of national security, bringing them directly under the command of the security establishment. The regime’s foundational religious ethos will undoubtedly persist, but a clerical establishment that once cultivated the military merely to buttress its own rule may ultimately find itself entirely subordinate to the armed forces.
Meanwhile, Arab Gulf states are radically reworking their own regional security doctrines. Some aspects of their new approach will undoubtedly please Tehran: after decades of striving to keep the United States deeply involved in regional security out of fear that an American withdrawal would leave them dangerously vulnerable, these Gulf monarchies have concluded that maintaining close, visible ties to the United States makes them prime targets for Iranian retaliation. Yet the Gulf states are highly unlikely to evict Washington entirely. For all its strategic shortcomings, the United States remains the only external power capable of providing a meaningful measure of military backing, and local distrust of Iran has only deepened since the outbreak of the war. Indeed, several Gulf states have actively retaliated against the Islamic Republic when provoked.
Instead, these regional governments are turning toward a strategy of diplomatic hedging. They are actively forging stronger diplomatic and economic linkages with Iran in hopes of persuading Tehran to halt its attacks on their territory, while simultaneously retaining vital security and economic ties with Washington. At the same time, Gulf nations have begun investing heavily in domestic missile defense systems, hardening critical national infrastructure, establishing alternative energy export routes, and building up larger strategic reserves of oil, gas, and advanced weaponry. The wider region may also increasingly attempt to leverage its unique positioning with both Tehran and Washington to mediate the ongoing conflict.
One Battle After Another
Wars are inherently chaotic, and it remains entirely possible that a future attack, miscalculation, or unforeseen event could disrupt the current equilibrium. As both countries grow more accustomed to the existing status quo, they might develop overconfidence in their defensive capabilities and deliberately choose to escalate. Washington, for instance, could eventually be tempted to force the Iranian regime to buckle through a far more devastating military assault—a move that would likely prompt Iran to cause massive global market turmoil and inflict severe damage across the Gulf.
Similarly, if an Iranian missile strike were to kill a large number of American service members, or if an Iranian-backed attack completely shut down critical Gulf energy infrastructure, the United States might finally opt to deploy ground forces or systematically destroy Iran’s electrical grid, putting the survival of the regime in genuine peril.
Conversely, Tehran could be dangerously mistaken in its belief that it can continue to inflict prolonged economic pain on its own population without consequence. Cascading shortages of essential goods could spark renewed mass domestic unrest and high-level elite defections, making it significantly harder for the regime to simultaneously fight the United States and maintain ironclad domestic control. An apparently manageable national deterioration could rapidly devolve into something far more dangerous: a collapsing capacity to govern the nation, rather than merely a dwindling capacity to prosecute the war.
For the present moment, however, the war appears remarkably sustainable for both primary combatants. Washington has failed to achieve any of its stated strategic objectives and has burned through vast stockpiles of expensive munitions. Yet the United States can still easily afford to continue the battle, and it firmly believes that the political and strategic costs of giving in far outweigh the costs of persistence.
Iranian society, meanwhile, faces years of deepening impoverishment, inflation, and insecurity. Yet the apparatus of the Islamic Republic remains stable, and its leaders remain convinced that they cannot afford to make meaningful strategic concessions.
Such is the profound paradox of this grinding conflict. Both sides have emerged from the fighting noticeably weaker. Neither can achieve a definitive victory. Yet they continue to fight on regardless, simply because they find all available alternatives to be completely unpalatable.
